Chapter 2: Born on a Limb

By exposing my past of childhood abuse and eventual self-abuse, it may seem like I'm going out on a limb. Not so — I was born there.

In fact, I venture to guess we're all born out on a limb of variable risk no matter the status of the limb, be it: Love or abuse. Strengthening or sapping. Rich or poor. It's all risk from the moment we pop out of our Womb Without A View.

How we maneuver after we land on our fated limb seems to direct the script for how we book the rest of our trip.

It all relates to the attitude we choose to adopt when evaluating our kidhood. Whether we blame it or thank it. Whether “it” was an example of how to live, or not to live. Whether we opt to work with it, or against it. Whether we use our kidhood as a springboard for growth, or as an excuse for denying our potential to create a successful life.

Whether we choose to duplicate, or reverse it. Whether we launch our future on self-credit cruises by taking responsibility for our adulthood, or opt for a Scapegoat Safari via blaming others and the world-at-large for what our life seems to lack.

And if it lacks, we then get to decide whether or not we summon the courage to explore the original cause for our feelings of incompletion in the light of reality. Deciding without the hunger to make ourselves neither a victim nor victor. Simply to see the past as it was. Not as we may have conned ourselves into believing it was. Nor how it might have been. To see if our past may be harboring the stimulus that is affecting our current choices.

Looking back, I find the stress currents waiting for me on my birth limb offered 3 directions for governing my future:

(1) I could've crawled into the mother tree, crumbling under its own weight of self-inflicted anger, and gnarled myself into attitudes I despised under the hallucination of being loved, if only as an obedient clone and show biz product 2 earn $$$ for my mom.

(2) I could've clung desperately to that rickety limb, struggling to believe: One day my family tree will transform into my concept of the ideal mothering energy. Loving me exactly as I long to be loved and nurtured, which I now call:

By doing so, I'd have ended all likelihood of refocusing my energy toward discovering who I was; what I could give to life. I'd have shelved all potential for scripting my own Love Story. I'd have smothered myself beneath the misguided illusion that I had the right to change my mother into who I wanted her to be. Into who she might never be. Nor wanted to be.

(3) I could let go of the anger emanating from the Mother Tree, using it to catapult my life from a weeping willow to an evergreen forest. Flying free toward taking charge of my own life — rather than dangling from a sacrificial limb. Flying free to not give a damn as to whether I soared or crashed. Simply that I tried.

Having traveled all 3 directions during my journey, without doubt, I believe: Letting Go To Grow was the best path.

It's funny though, while I hardly relate to who I once was and how I once reacted, I recently discovered tiny invisible vines still tying me into my kidhood program … emotional reactions that subtly colored how I handled my relationship with family, friends, in-laws, business, and mostly with me.

My serenity quaked when I realized how my reactions to showdowns or another's anger, hang-ups or lust for control were paralleling the survival formula I ran on years ago — which made me think:

Is there really only five distinct personalities in our specie and the rest is done with fun house mirrors?

Why else, dear Self, did I keep running into the same people with different names and faces? Sure, I know each one of us is a unique concoction of quirks and caprices, but why did I keep re-upping with my mother in the cloakings of, at least, 50-some people over the years, ex-es, in-laws and step-kids included?

Possibly, those proxies kept weaving through my Lifal Puzzle so I could finally speak my piece of mind and bid bye-bye to her duplicated energy in the way I never got to when she governed my world. So I could delete the need for magnetizing brutality into my life, and cease volunteering into War Games that held no chance for victory.

I now sense that reoccurring energy kept appearing to offer a necessary road for growth that I needed to explore, cross, conquer, and exit without blinding strings of guilt or regret.

I suspect life kept serving me energies similar to my mother's so I would finally accept the message within those encounters. So I would Let Go of my fantasy so as to accept who she was as-is. So I'd then be free to accept me as-is. Free to establish who I am without the handicap of her prior judgment still sculpting my thought process.

So I could finally acknowledge that the anger she directed at the little kid I once was had nothing to do with me — similar to so many people's anger having nothing to do with the targets of their hostility. And, to admit that it's time to scrub off the leftover granules of hostile memories still skulking in the hip pocket of my heart.

It's time to concede to the futility of my prior quest of hoping my mother would like, approve, love, and be proud of me. Heck! To my memory, she never liked, approved, loved, nor was proud of herself. So, no matter how I begged or prayed, how could I expect her to give me what she would not give herself?

It seems there's no way we can ever be free-to-be as long as we continue to give others — past, present, alive, or not — the right to control our thoughts, even to a subconscious degree.

As long as we let the anger and fear-filled judgments of others negate our ability to love ourselves as-is, we dis-ease ourselves into remaining spiritually paralyzed.

Some of us never come face-to-face with who we really are, nor with the undercurrents which cause us to deny who we are, unless life pushes us to look deep within our private mirrors.

Life's favorite push is to set us up so that whenever we struggle to act contrary to the highest capacity of what we're capable of achieving, our plans collapse. We feel subtly irked and irritated — like being annoyed by a sliver we can't extract from our bug toe – or woe.

HYPOTHETICALLY: If our soul's journey ticket reads destination New York then there's no way to find contentment in Alaska without continuous struggle and hardship.

So too with careers, relationships, lifestyles or attitudes wherein something tells us our subtitle ought to be Miss Placed. If we have the soul of a sailor, we'll never cut it as a happy coal miner — no matter how long that trade has dangled from our family creed.

Equally, if we are misjudging our worth, our potential for happiness, based on an abusive kidhood that we struggle to believe held some iota of honor and truth, our gut won't let us easily carry the shackles of past misjudgments into our adulthood.

No matter how we struggle to deny our kidhood wherein abuse or degradation was the main strain, no matter how we may try to grab the blame for our abuser's violations in order to keep our family's image on its shaky pedestal, our gut never ceases urging us to drop denial and dig for truth.

Life constantly plants needed clues, like cosmic Burma Shave signs, upon our path to tell us we're headed on the wrong assumption with deficient guidebooks. Usually by causing us to botch our most logical schemes when they're not in sync with how we need to advance toward our spiritual betterment.

Sure. It's easy to see through the pointlessness of unrequited relationships when we're not involved in one. Yet we often fail to see they exist between many parents and kids. Birth does not guarantee automatic entry into another's heart — be it the heart of a child, parent, or sibling.

TROUBLE IS: Instead of pausing to decode the obvious messages blazing from the frustrations we run into, we generally plow even harder into the brick walls set up to set us straight.

Bruised and bloody with scars, we keep smacking our hearts into those prophetic stop signs, as Life keeps bull-dozing us to either grow more frustrated or re-examine our thinking; to devise new motivations for how we're living, for where we are headed and for what we're seeking to capture.

When we're fueled on the false assumption that only others can tell us what we're worth — or only they can make us whole — we repeatedly fall into fractured unions. And then fall into the delusionary trap of blaming destiny, karma or whatever for the tumble, rather than heeding the message that it's about time we changed focus and refuel.

Fuel prescribed in kidhood when we're taught to believe only others have the right to vote as to whether we're Naughty or Nice. Be it parents, teachers, coaches — even Santa! A personal vote is traditionally judged as trivial against the majority's, as is a kid's vote against an adult's.

And in an abusive home, a kid's vote never gets voiced, let alone acknowledged to exist. And the parental vote of Naughty! rarely stops being arbitrarily cast.

Abused kids quickly assume their feelings, ideas and observations don't count — which is a tough barnacle to scrape when we don't realize it's still clinging to our adultself.

Even when life goes full throttle causing our world (as we want to perceive it) to crumble before our eyes in the hope we will be forced to create new blueprints for living, we still tend to roost in predictability nests, no matter how uncomforting.

And for us stubborn ones, Life can dole out numerous kicks in our lethargic fannies to wake us up to see:

♥	The way we're acting and reacting may be totally against where and how we need to proceed for our spiritual contentment.
♥	That we may be subconsciously duplicating the difficulties of our abusive kidhood by becoming our own abusers.
♥	That we may still be emotionally financing a pathetic production we need to close so as to upgrade to a finer story line.

That we may be pushing away what we most crave by wanting it so intently from the wrong sources — be it attention or love. A process that may be causing us to deny our reason for existing beyond The Oops Factor.

When we tunnel-vision our lives toward grasping for a returned emotion from another, be it hearing we're terrific, or ought to drop dead, we turn ourselves into dependent wads of overstretched Nutty Putty.

As such, we're apt to remold ourselves into who and what we assume others want us to be so we can be fed our desired kiddy treat of artificial Life Savers.

We disguise our true selves behind personas we hope will get us the feedback we want from others. And, all for the rock bottom price of not discovering who and what we truly are.

It's equally frustrating when abused kids get trapped into the struggle of trying to make unloving parents love them as they long to be loved. It equals battered women who deny their needs while struggling to become the perfect sacrificial punching bag so as to gain an erratic husband's mock-love.

Yet this suffocating tunnel vision focused solely on getting from another that which they are unwilling to give can boomerang by deadening our motivation to love ourselves.

Too often we relinquish our lives to others who have not yet found love or the meaning for their lives. Others eager to judge us so as to avoid facing their self-inquisition.

I remember my mother once throwing the 8 year old I once was into a dark closet, screaming as she struggled with the lock: “You're an evil kid! You ought to be locked away forever so no one would ever have to look at you!” Her vote was cast because I didn't curl her hair “perfectly” that day, as I was trained to be her daily hair stylist when she was in town.

Unfortunately, I stayed in the closet for most of my life by believing my vote didn't matter to others; that my needs were insignificant compared to hers, to my ex-es … or to anyone.

I abstained from casting my vote in what appeared to be an erratic election. I imagined that if I dared to vote, I'd get caught with lights and sirens suddenly screaming: This ballot is invalid! She has no right to vote! She's a lawbreaker!

When you've grown up from having been programmed with a disruptive disc fed by an abusive programmer who aimed at deleting your self worth, who wanted control of your kidhood through guilt and fear of never being good enough or lovable enough or whatever enough — then it ain't easy setting up a brand new memory bank, as it involves examining and clearing the old one of bugs.

It involves reassessing the treatment you were force fed as a kid. Treatment you wanted to believe was “for your own good” (as told) so you could keep your parent on a pedestal, so they could still seem capable of giving you the love you wanted when you're “finally!” — one day — good enough to please them.

Treatment you may have to admit was not nice then, and even less nice now if allowed to rule over your self-worth.

It wasn't easy to excavate my kidhood, to examine it with detachment that which was so deeply buried in my system. It wasn't easy to relive being a trapped kid in the web of what was a diabolic expression of parental possession.

Not easy to realize the irrational beatings, incessant rejections and molestations my mother let her boyfriends enact on me were not what I “asked for!”. Not the acts of the supportive, loving mother I fantasized she must surely be . . . somewhere.

Seeing how what happened then might still be contaminating my current thought process. And seeing that I was the only one who could launder it from my system.

Gutting out the blame I took on for what happened as a kid, placing it where it belonged while not seeking revenge. Nor deluding myself that I could only be free of those nightmares if she said; “I'm sorry. I was wrong.”

To demand that scenario so as to authenticate my personal freedom would mean I was still giving her power over my life, wellbeing and emotional health.

By learning my vote does count, I learned I could free myself from the memories that continued to haunt me.

I could do it! I didn't have to wait for her to one day tell me I was lovable. I could examine my life, attitudes, feelings, motives, and relationships, then vote on my own love-ability. And whatever that tallied up to be, at least I could trust the voters: me and my conscience.

Excavating ain't easy, but it's the only way to free up enough disc space for a potentially terrific ME — or YOU — to enter. Tough as it may seem, it sure beats the alternative of living in limbo.

Negative setups are not certainties Carved-In-Granite-By-God. They are People Scripts. Ergo!, able to be rewritten.